“The Chamberlain Effect”: When did World War Two really begin?

The 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two this week will pass
almost unnoticed in the Czech Republic. The reason is simple. For Czechs
and Slovaks the tragedy did not begin with the invasion of Poland, but a
full year earlier. With the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Britain,
France and Italy gave Hitler the green light to annex huge tracts of
Czechoslovakia and less than six months later, Nazi troops marched into
what was left of the Czech lands unopposed. So how did Hitler get away with
bringing a determined and well-defended democratic country under the sway
of the swastika, while Czechoslovakia’s allies stood by? The British
historian and politician, David Faber, has tried to answer this question in
his book, Munich: The 1938 Appeasement Crisis, which focuses above all on
the role of the British political establishment, in particular Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain. This is the most detailed account of the
events leading up to Munich to be published for several decades, and an
American edition is due out this month. I caught up with David Faber in
London, and we discussed some of the many aspects of a book that deserves
to become a classic.

“I started off looking at the secondary sources, and we’re fortunate in
that we have many sets of memoirs of many of the key protagonists of the
time from the various different countries. So, we have an absolute wealth
of material. Many of the key protagonists kept diaries, wrote their own
memoirs subsequently, and it was really a bit like a jigsaw, piecing
together all the individual quotes and the individual moments and times
when things were happening. Very often I found that having looked at an
event that had happened in London and an event that had happened in Prague
or in Berlin, or even in Rome, and that these two things had happened at
roughly the same time. So I was able to put people’s speech side by side,
as to what they’d been thinking in the different capitals of Europe at
the time.”

The view of the Munich Crisis from the perspective of the Czech Republic
is very much that Britain let down Czechoslovakia, almost as if it were a
foregone conclusion. From your book I think you get a rather more nuanced
picture of what was going on politically, that it maybe even needn’t have
happened that way.

“The ultimate result was that Czechoslovakia was let down. And I think
in the end, both in the immediate aftermath of Munich and of course in
March the following year in 1939, there was no doubt that Czechoslovakia
had been let down by Britain - and also by France of course, in many ways a
closer ally of hers at the time. But I agree with you that none of the
politicians really set out to do that. This wasn’t a deliberate policy. I
think Chamberlain’s weaknesses were that he was a very arrogant and a
very vain man, and I think that once he had set himself on a particular
course, he decided that he was right and he really wouldn’t brook any
confrontation with anyone close to him. And his vanity led him to believe,
especially after his meetings with Hitler, that he was in some way getting
the better of Hitler, whereas, in fact, the exact opposite was the case.”

And it seems amazing, when you read contemporary sources, that many people
in Europe, including in Germany itself, really did think that Chamberlain
had got the better of Hitler, didn’t they?

“They did, and of course in the immediate aftermath of the Munich
Crisis, albeit only for a few days or weeks, Chamberlain was perceived as a
great hero in London, as indeed Daladier the French prime minister was in
Paris. They were perceived as having pulled of a great coup, albeit at the
expense of the hapless Czechs. But that didn’t last very long.

“I think that there was a twofold sense that things had not gone right.
First was that I think the British people woke up to the fact that this
was, from a purely selfish point of view, unlikely to postpone war for
ever. Of course, one of the most important things to recognize is that,
however much he may have been lauded later for postponing war and enabling
the Allies to be better prepared for the Second World War, that was not the
intention of Chamberlain and the people immediately around him. His
intention, as he proudly boasted when he came back from Munich, was to
achieve peace for all time, and he firmly believed that he had achieved
peace.

“The second thing was that the British people in particular, and I think
the French also, did recognize and I think felt a strong sense of guilt on
behalf of the Czechs, and there was a great outpouring of support for
Czechoslovakia in the months after the Munich crisis. There was a very
famous story that the Lord Mayor of London set up a fund to help to send
money to Czechoslovakia and to help many of the refugees who’d had to
flee the Sudeten areas. Chamberlain was alleged to have told him that he
didn’t want this fund to happen – that it would offend the Germans in
some way. It’s a really extraordinary thing to look back on now in
hindsight. So there was a great outpouring of relief that war had been
averted, but I think guilt and shame that the Czechs were being forced to
go through what they did.”

Adolf Hitler signing the Munich AgreementI’m very interested in the fact that you have written this book as a
person who has his own political background. You were a member of the
British parliament for the Conservative Party. In your own family there is
also a link with this episode, in that your grandfather was the later
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. In what ways have your family
experiences and also your experiences as an active politician influenced
the ways that you have perceived the episode? It must have given you some
insights into the way that politics works, for example.

“It did very much. Taking the family connection first – yes, I was
obviously very proud of my grandfather and was very relieved - although I
already knew it when I started writing the book - to discover that he had
been on the right side of the argument as I perceived it, that he had been
a great anti-appeaser in the late 1930s. And obviously, having read his
autobiographies and many of his papers, I knew what his views had been at
the time. As far as my own political experience goes, I found that
absolutely invaluable in writing the book. Anyone who knows about a
specific world and knows how it operates, whatever it happens to be,
obviously has a slight insight. And so I was particularly fascinated by the
ins and outs, the political comings and goings, I could picture the
geography of where the meetings took place, where the debates were being
held, of where some of the cabinet meetings were being held. So I was able
to – if not picture the people – to picture the scene around them and
know what they were going through.

Neville Chamberlain with Adolf Hitler (right)
“I think there was something that was also very important and a very
strong connection to my own, much briefer political career. When I first
got into the British House of Commons in 1992, it was at the height of the
debate within the Conservative Party over the degree to which the British
Conservative Party and the British Government should be at the heart of
Europe. This was an iconic issue within the Conservative Party, and the
pressure to conform at the time and the pressure to toe the party line and
do as one was told by the senior politicians in your own party was
enormous. I could absolutely sense, when I was researching the Munich
crisis, this same feeling of pressure and almost of bullying pressure being
applied from the senior government - from the prime minister down - onto
the junior politicians, the backbenchers, as they’re called in the
British parliament.”

I’m interested that you mention the question of European integration. I
would have thought that one of the messages of Munich would be that
democratic countries should try as much as possible to integrate with one
another both economically and politically, as this increases the pressure
on undemocratic forces not to undermine the democratic nations that are
grouped together.

“Well of course you’re quite right to say that and I agree absolutely
with that. You mentioned my grandfather, and I come from a very strong
pro-European tradition. I studied modern languages at university. I’ve
been fortunate enough to travel widely in Europe and I come from a
political tradition within the Conservative Party – which there still is,
thankfully – of much closer union and strong ties with the rest of
Europe. But as we know, throughout generations and throughout different
periods of history, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Certainly, in
the early 1990s, when I took my own first steps in politics – and there
still is today, I hasten to add – there was a very strong body of opinion
within the Conservative Party and within some of the other parties as well,
which opposed greater European integration. As we speak today, the current
leader of the Conservative Party has moved away from the mainstream in the
European Parliament to sit with other people. In many ways, you could say
that there are items of history that repeat themselves almost relentlessly
through the years. But you could say that people never learn the lessons of
the past in that respect.”

Signing of the Munich Agreement. Left to right: Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, Adolf Hitler and Benito MussoliniOne of the very interesting issues in connection with the Munich debate is
that there is no consensus internationally and there is certainly no
consensus in Britain about Neville Chamberlain’s decision to appease
Hitler. To this day there is quite a strong body of thought, and there have
been books written about it, arguing that Chamberlain was doing the right
thing, that he was gaining time, that appeasing Hitler in 1938 made Britain
stronger in the run up to the Second World War. In a sense, in writing
about Neville Chamberlain’s role in a very negative way, you could be
accused by people in your own party of fouling your own nest. He was a
Conservative politician and there are still many Conservatives who would
sympathise with his decision then.

“Funnily enough, I’m not sure that the issue of support for
Chamberlain necessarily divides along party lines. I think that the
Conservatives as a party are not particularly enamoured of Neville
Chamberlain when they look back. He gets a very bad press by and large from
conservative (with a small “c”) writers and observers. But you’re
quite right that his reputation has suffered ups and downs over the past 60
or 70 years. In immediate aftermath of the Second World War he was really
vilified in Britain. Then in the 1970s a lot of the government papers
relating to this period were released and a number of historians at the
time took the opportunity to write pro-Chamberlain works along the lines
that he was actually quite perspicacious in looking ahead and in appeasing
Hitler, and that he did buy us time. For instance, the first Spitfires that
fought in the Battle of Britain only rolled out of the factories just in
time for the Battle of Britain in 1940, and, had we had to go to war in
1938 over Czechoslovakia, we would have been ill-prepared. I think that
nowadays there are fewer historians who are prepared to take that line.

“I have taken a line in my book that Chamberlain was at fault, but I
have based that not so much on his political decisions. What I found very
difficult to sympathise with, reading his letters and in particular his own
contemporary narrative of the period, was that he did believe really much
too firmly in his own ability and in his own political credibility. He used
to use this expression called “the Chamberlain effect”. He really
believed that he had some kind of momentous effect on everyone he met,
including Hitler, and he was badly mistaken in that. He ran an
extraordinarily undemocratic government, and indeed the decisions at the
time of the Munich crisis were taken by a very small group of people, all
of whom had signed up to and were utterly committed to his own political
line.”

Your book, “Munich: The 1938 Appeasement Crisis”, was published last
year, in 2008, and it’s just come out, I believe, in paperback as well.

“It has, and I’m happy to say that it seems to be doing very well. And
it’s coming out in America in September 2009, which is very exciting. I
think it’s a period of history that the Americans seem to be fascinated
by. There was American involvement at the time of Munich. Roosevelt was
closely in touch with what was going on, although he was not really in a
position to alter events in the end, but there’s no doubt in America that
the word “Munich” is a dirty word. It is undoubtedly a word which
implies appeasing dictators, and successive American presidents since the
Second World War have often used that to justify their foreign policy.”